


I’m little but I'm coming for your title

by Utopiste



Series: 30 days writing challenge [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 13-year-old boys are idiots but what's new?, F/M, Slytherin Hermione Granger, Slytherin Ron Weasley, Slytherins Being Slytherins, somewhat of a character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-11-01 23:23:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20543180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Utopiste/pseuds/Utopiste
Summary: “Yes, Hermione Granger,” Blaise confirms.“Does she even count, though?” Ron says, pulling a face. “I swear I don’t know why the Sorting Hat put her in Slytherin with us. That girl a nightmare!”And of course, that is when Hermione Granger, who had been standing behind them for far too long for it to be innocent, hexes him right in the back.(Wherein thirteen-year-old boys are wrong, always, Ron and Hermione might not be so terrible at being Slytherins after all, and Harry invented being smug as a snake.)





	I’m little but I'm coming for your title

**Author's Note:**

> written for day four of CommodoreCliche's writing challenge: "write the worst possible way your OTP could’ve met"
> 
> alright, i feel like it's not the WORST way they could have met? but it's pretty bad. they get better
> 
> title from Still Sane by Lorde because of who I am as a person + not really betaed so if you spot anything PLEASE tell me

It is not as if he doesn’t like Hermione Granger. Or as if he likes her, either. Actually, outside of rolling his eyes with Harry when she parades in class, all right answers and overeagerness, most of the time, Ron pretty much forgets she exists.

Even if Granger has always been in his year and house, Ron can’t really say he has ever talked to her for any other reason than asking her if he could borrow her feather to write (no) or if she had the answer to the third question of their Potions quiz (her look at that had been so indignant he had taken care to avoid her for weeks afterward). And so, really, the first time he _actually_ _ meets _ _her_ is in their third year, while sitting with the few other Slytherin boys he gets along with on the grass near the Great Lake, already catching a sunburn on the tip of the nose he hadn’t quite grown into yet, laughing. Early September feels like every day could be the last day of summer, a moment to enjoy before tomorrow brings back woolen sweaters and burning firewood in the humid cold of their Common Room. 

For the first time since his first year, when the Sorting Hat laughed in his face and called him _unusual, very much so,_ Ron has the impression he has friends other than Harry. A feeling he can only explain as the opposite of loneliness glows in his chest and warms him up even in the breeze, and he waves his hands too much when he speaks and laughs too easily and tries to prove to them that he is more than a misplaced Weasley like it will prove anything to himself. 

“Alright,” Blaise Zabini says, a smirk always in place even at thirteen. “Fuck, marry, kill: the Slytherin girls of our year. Go.”

“Fuck Tracey, marry Daphne, kill Pansy,” Theodore Nott shoots back without bothering to look up from his novel. “Obviously.”

“That was fast,” Harry says, but there is laughter in his voice. “Thought about it much?”

Theodore raises his face just long enough to roll his eyes at him.

“And incomplete,” Blaise adds.

“I figured counting Millicent Bulstrode in would be like hexing a hippogriff on fire,” Theodore says with all of the easy cruelty of a thirteen-year-old boy.

A voice in the back of Ron’s head that sounds like his mother tells him so and even then he laughs along with Blaise and Theodore himself. He turns to his best friend to catch Harry sharing a somewhat subdued smile. 

“That’s a good one, Theo,” Blaise says as the other boy hides his pleased smile in his book once again. “There is one more girl your eagle eyes failed to account for, though.”

There is a pause among them before realization dawns on the boys.

“Oh, of course,” Harry says. “Hermione Granger, right?”

“Yes, Hermione Granger,” Blaise confirms, smug as a snake.

“Does she even count, though?” Ron says, pulling an exaggerated face as he speaks to earn some cheap laughs. “I swear I don’t know why the Sorting Hat put her in Slytherin. That girl a nightmare!”

And of course, that is when Granger, who has been standing behind them for far too long for it to be innocent, hexes him right in the back. 

If he is honest with himself, it is a very Slytherin move: if any other Slytherin was looking for evidence that she really did belong among them, it would have pointed them in the right direction. And if he is honest with himself, he sort of deserves it. 

But his shoulders are stuck in a sickly green shade, and that color stays on for three entire weeks after the school nurse has even managed to pull off the slugs from his skin, and Draco Malfoy laughs at him in the corridors, so honesty isn’t quite enough to keep him from complaining about what a crazy witch she is. And so he does. Loudly. To anyone who will listen to him. For days and days, until Harry snaps a “We get it, alright?” and Theodore follows suit by shaking his head at him, and Ron stops, because pissing off Harry is as far as he is willing to go in his self-pity.

Truth is, Granger is usually so straight-laced and set on following the rules that even teachers don’t quite know what to do with her this time around. Since Professor Snape might be the head of their house but that doesn’t mean he dislikes either of them any less, he has the brilliant idea to get her to make up for this by tutoring Ron in Potions, which is a serious case of being blessed with suck. On the one hand, if he survives it, he will definitely get Outstandings on all of his Potions tests until he graduates; on the other hand, the odds of her jinxing him before the end of the semester are only growing with each study session.

It is not as if they had any choice in the matter, though, in spite of how energetically they both protest, so this is how they wind up, on a Tuesday evening, standing next to each other in the cold and stagnant air of the dungeons, next to a cauldron and a thousand ingredients Ron only knows because his mother uses them in her own concoctions.

He and Granger stare at each other defiantly before she works her jaw and says: “Alright, the first thing you’re going to want to do is crush up your bat wings in the biggest chestnut bowl you can find.”

Ron sort of wants to tell her to bugger off, sort of wants to tell her he doesn’t have any idea what a chestnut bowl looks like compared to any other bloody wooden bowl, and sort of wants to apologize for being a jerkwad. In the end, he chooses none of these options and goes to get the wrong bowl three times before she huffs in annoyance and gets it for him. Curls of thick dark hair whip him in the face as she does, explaining something about the recognizable reddish hue of that particular wood and its applications in Potions that he doesn’t care to listen to. (Her hair smells like fruity girly soap and rainy days and nothing more.)

So Ron grits his teeth through it all. By the end of his third sullen, annoyed tutoring lesson, they manage to bring down the arguing to three times in an hour, a not unimpressive feat Harry points out with only minimal sarcasm.

After his fourth, Ron pulls off the best potion he has ever managed and gets an E.E. for the first time in Snape’s class – he doesn’t realize how weird he is acting before he rushes to the desk Hermione shares with Daphne and pulls her into a one-armed hug. They both freeze instantly and shuffle awkwardly away from each other after a second, unable to look at each other’s faces. 

But when he finally does, Granger has something like a genuine smile on her face and it is the first time Ron has seen it in three years and he might not understand a lot of things about girls, but he is starting to think that maybe she is just lonely.

“So you got an E.E., uh? Was this your first time?” she says, and it takes him a second to bypass indignation and realize she is joking. Hermione Granger is making a joke.

“We can’t all have Optimal, you know,” he answers easily. “Some of us have a life.”

Instead of jinxing him, Grager snorts with a lack of _ retenue _ that probably offends Daphne on a personal level, and she has to raise her head to smile back at him, a real, full smile this time, one that crinkles her eyes and shows all of her teeth before she covers her mouth with her hand. 

His ears warm up when he grins back at her.

To pay her back, by the ninth lesson, Ron offers to tutor her in Divination, another class they share that Hermione is notoriously bad at, insulting the teacher in increasingly ingenious ways that make him believe she might be right at home in Slytherin.

She yells at him.

She calls him things like _ pumpkin-haired buffoon _ and _ Dugbog brain _ and he calls her a weirdo and a freak before he tells her something in the lines of “it’s no wonder you don’t have any friend” and she pauses for a second, stricken, before she rushes out of the room.

If he feels bad about it, damn him if he is going to apologize: she started it, after all. He settles for glowering and stabbing his dinner with more strength than necessary as Theodore and Blaise carefully avoid him. Even Harry doesn’t know how to react – most of his advice revolves around some variation of “just talk to her if it bothers you that much”, in spite of how vehemently Ron denies any association with Loser Granger, ever.

They don’t talk for two long, boring weeks, until she marches up to him at dinnertime with a frown and a glare that would scare off Godric Gryffindor himself. A few seats down his left, Draco Malfoy chokes on his roasted pork. Ron blushes with his entire body and viciously hopes the other boy suffocates.

Then, after a few seconds of glowering and gritted teeth, Hermione tells him out of the blue that she accepts his offer as if _ she _ was doing him a service.

“You know I’m the one who’s helping you out here, right?” he points out.

She eyes his mouth still full of pork with disgust. “Excuse me, who got you an Optimal within less than ten Potions lessons?”

“I got that Optimal on my own, from my own hard work,” he says indignantly, and when Harry snorts next to him, even Ron’s own façade doesn’t quite hold on and he breaks into a grin. “That’s not very _ pedagogic _ of you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware you _ knew _ four-syllable words.”

“Well, I do. I’m a man of science,” he says, before pausing. He stops fighting off the half-smile that feels it is going to be stuck on his face forever when he adds: “After all, I did get an O in Potions less than two weeks ago.”

“Oh, bugger off,” she tells him, but she is smiling too, and she sits down next to him in the empty seat Theodore had avoided in reluctance to witness Ron’s sour mood.

They spend the rest of the evening fighting about everything from his table manners to her relentless badgering regarding everything, ever, only interrupted when they pass each other the mashed potatoes or the pumpkin pie. From their seat next to Harry, who is pretending very hard not to smirk like the smug bastard he is, Blaise and Theo watch them in raptured amazement while the other Slytherin students pretend not to notice them the way they always do anyway. The Blood Traitor and the Muggleborn. A great pair they are.

Ron is starting to think that maybe they are both terrible at being Slytherins. Yet when he tells Hermione how to bullshit her way into astrology readings and she admits in hushed tones that really, she just wants to prove them all she belongs in Hogwarts as much as anyone else and that she is going to show them all someday how wrong they are, he admits that what he wants most of all is to do something great enough with himself that finally his _ brothers _ will be the ones his parents compare to him. She gets very serious and puts her hand over his in a way that makes his entire body tingle for reasons he will only understand years later, and she makes him solemnly swear with her that they will make it, no matter how many fake astrology bulletins and failed potions they have to go through.

Watching the resolute glint in her brown eyes and the way her crooked smile with the too-big teeth looks a bit like joy and a bit like hunger, he decides that Slytherin might just be where they both belong. 


End file.
